Quotes

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

The white world outside the green, the opposite of Hiroko's green world outside the white. And they had opposite feelings about them. Looking from the green side, when Hiroko confronted something mysterious, she loved it and it made her happy -- it was viriditas, a holy power. Looking from the white side, when Sax confronted something mysterious, it was the Great Unexplainable, dangerous an awful. He was interested in the true, while Hiroko was interested in the real. Or perhaps it was the other way around -- those words are tricky.

p. 13

I like the contrast here of joy at a mystery and fight against what we don't know. And which is truth and which is real? Great stuff!

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-25T14:35:00.000-07:00

This is the second volume. It concerns much of the terraforming efforts to make Mars livable. Mostly it is the same characters.

Enjoy.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-22T15:33:00.000-07:00

Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining-room conviviality; it might have been anytime, anywhere, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together -- while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and a rockfall could annihilate them at any instant. And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they came into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created in a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other's company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the the cities under bombardment.

p. 504

I love dinner and the times we get together with friends and families ad we eat and talk. What a special time and how lucky we are to be able to share this time. It reinforces our humanity in so many ways. We celebrate our animal nature with the eating, and yet we celebrate our collective intelligence by doing it socially. How sad it is that some people cannot see this. And Hail to the Baha'is who use a shared meal as the basic religious ceremony.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

"Live," as the Japanese said helpfully, "as if you were already dead."

p. 371

What a concept from this society where everyone is always aware of the reactions of other people. To live as if one were dead means to live as if there were no consequences. I will have to check this out.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-20T15:17:00.000-07:00

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.

p. 379

Are there people who always have a political purpose? What a weird thing. I guess this is one reason I have trouble in meetings and school politics. I know that I am hard for many Japanese to understand. I always say what I mean or keep silent. I where my agenda on my sleeve. Some Japanese are always trying to figure out what I rally mean and what my real agenda is. I am also crippled because I take everything everyone says at face value. Do I have political Asperger's Syndrome?

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-19T15:12:00.000-07:00

" A talib is a seeker and the seeker's tariqat is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality."

p. 281

These are Arabic terms, from Sufi's that are roving Mars. What a concept that we are all on a journey towards reality. Very Buddhist. And if we are all moving towards death, is death the ultimate reality? What a depressing thought.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

"... If you don't go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and other infrastructure workers would always rate as the most productive of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all."

"sounds about right to me," John joked, but Vlad and Marina ignored him.

"Anyway, that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then they pretend that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful."

p. 269

Economics as astrology - yeah. I always thought the advice I got from my astrologer was better han the advice that I got from my broker. And I never thought that either one had much of a grounding in reality.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-18T14:49:00.000-07:00

It was a good winter. He learned a lot about areobotany and bioengineering, and in many of the evenings, after dinner, he would ask the Archeon people, both individually and severally what they thought the eventual Martian society should be like, and how it should be run. At Archeon this usually led directly to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot economics; these were to them much more critical than politics, or what Marina called "the supposed decision-making apparatus."

p. 269

(note: Archeon is a research center doing terra forming of Mars)

I love the idea that economics as the deformed offspring of ecology. Money is a measure of the energy in a system. That is all. However, the drive for wealth perverts it into something of importance all out of proportion to the reality. and it just gets it wrong so often.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-17T14:35:00.000-07:00

... the beige and yellow tiles they sat on had started to throb, as if lit from within; light gleamed on every water droplet covering the tiles, like tiny chips of lightning scattered everywhere, and Maya's body sprawled over the sparkling tiles pulsing before him like a pink candle. The intense thereness of it -- "haecceity," Sax had called it once, when John had asked him about his religious beliefs -- I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was felling he thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to moment.

p. 265

And we only have this moment, for ever. Wow!

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

Extroversion-introversion was one of the best-studied systems of traits in all psychological theory, with great masses of evidence fro many different cultures supporting the objective reality of the concept. Not as a simple duality of course; one did not simply label a person plainly this or that, but rather placed them on a scale, rating them for qualities such as sociability, impulsiveness, changeability, talkativeness, outgoingness, activity, liveliness, excitability, optimism, and so on. These measurements had been done so many times that it was statistically certain that the various traits did indeed hang together, to a degree that the exceeded chance by a huge amount. So the concept was real, quite real! In fact psychological investigations had revealed that extroversion was linked with resting rates of low cortical arousal, introversion with high cortical arousal; this had sounded backward to Michel at first, but then he remembered that the cortex inhibit the lower centers of the brain, so that low cortical arousal allows the more uninhibited behavior of the extrovert, while the high cortical arousal is inhibitory and leads to introversion. This explained why drinking alcohol, a depressant which lowers cortical arousal, could lead excited and uninhibited behavior.

p. 195

Two points here. First, I always wonder about the science in these books. They are not called science fiction for nothing. Still, it has the tone of authority that makes it sound accurate. I also wonder how much of my approach to life, which I would put in the scientific/analytical bracket, comes from the stuff I read from an early age. Often it gave me a way to visualize the concepts I had learned. And that is part of the power of fiction. It allows us to see things in a new way, not just science, but also the human relationships that are at the heart of any great or even good story. We are testing out what might be. I once heard it said that that was why romantic comedies are such popular films - we are all trying to figure out the relationship game.

The second point has to do with the content. The character, Michel, thinks of these things in terms of suppression of the higher and expression of the lower. I sort of think of these things in Freudian terms. If there is higher critical arousal, then the super ego is given more power. The introvert does more thinking about stuff, not the knee-jerk reaction of the extrovert. The days are spent in thought because of the arousal. We don't do things because we keep thinking about it. I often think back to a high school reading - Milton's two poems, L'Allegero and il Penseroso. Once again the visual images have stuck with me all these years, even though the words are gone. I guess I could look them up. LOL

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

Ann pursed her lips, stared out the window, shook her head. Her face could be so bleak; it couldn't be explained entirely by Mars, there had to be more to it, something that explained that intense internal spin, that anger. Bessie Smith land. It was hard to watch. When Maya was unhappy it was like Ella Fitzgerald singing a blues, you knew it was a put-on, the exuberance just poured through it. But when Ann was unhappy it hurt to watch it.

p. 139

What a fun metaphor - emotions like great divas. And it fits so well.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

"The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when the listeners remember the discussion, what really matters is that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y."

p. 71

And as I write this, Barak Obama has just made it as the Democratic nominee fo president. And we will all be looking at the "persuasive arguments" of the up coming campaign. And it will all come down to who we like, especially our friends.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-07T15:26:00.000-07:00

This is going to be fun. Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is the start of the series that made me think of creating this blog. I have read it at least four times, and each time I read it, I thought "Oh, this is a great idea. I should mark it." As I went on reading, without marking those passages, I would feel a slight disappointment. I wanted to save those ideas. So, as I realized that I would be working my way through to reading this again, I started this blog.

So, here we go, it is the year 2030 and the first 100 settlers are going to land on Mars and start to build a new world.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-06T00:03:00.000-07:00

Things you don't like, things you think are wrong, you can always walk away. You will be happier. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. But compassion is not just a feeling. You have to act.

p. 235

Active compassion - or taking actions based on our compassion. Very hard to do.

And that is a good place to end this trilogy. They all live happily ever after and so one. It was a good read.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-05T00:03:00.000-07:00

"Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in your model, no one pays for it. The carbon the British Petroleum burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so actually it's thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported a profit of twenty- three billion, but if you added the damage cost it would be eight billion in the red. These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. Your helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five hundred gigatons of carbon you are describing as inevitable because o your financial shell games, then two thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It's the stupidest head-in-the-sand answer possible."

The World Bank guys flinched at this. "Well," one of them said, "we don't se it that way."

Charlie said, "That's the trouble. You see the way the banking industry ses it, and they make money by manipulating money irrespective of effects in the real wold. You've spent a trillion dollars of the American taxpayers' money over the lifetime of the bank, and there's nothing to show for it. You go into poor countries and force them to sell their assets to foreign investors and to switch from subsistance agriculture to ch crops, then when the prices of those crops collapse you call this nicely competitive on the world market. The local populations starve and then you insist on austerity measures even though your actions shattered the economy. You order them to cut their social services to pay off their debts to you and your financial community investors, and you devalue their real assets and then buy them on the cheap and sell them elsewhere for more. The assets of that country have been strip-mined and now belong to international finance. That's your idea of development. You were intended to be the Marshall Plan and instead you've been the United Fruit Company.

p. 144

I have seldom seen the state of the world economy stated so succinctly or so eloquently.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-06-04T00:03:00.000-07:00

on a rave in Solona beach:

... it was true in the Belly-Up of the beast, in the cacophonous sweaty strobed space of the rave, there were plenty of alternative life styles being enacted right before his very eyes. Most provocatively in fact. Some very serious kissing and other acts, dance as simulated standing sex, heck actual standing sex if you were at all loose with the definition.

p. 118

I've been there and done that, but not recently. Maybe I should keep a closer eye on the schedule for the Belly Up.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-25T00:03:00.000-07:00

on The Three Box Game:

Three boxes, all closed, one ten-dollar bill hidden in one of them; the experimenter knows which. Subject chooses one box, at that point left closed. Experimenter opens one of the other two boxes, always an empty one. Subject then offered a chance to either stick with his first choice, or switch to the other closed box. What should he do?

Frank had decided it didn't matter, fifty-fifty either way. He thought it through.

But each box at the start had a one-third chance of being the one. When subject chooses one, the other two have a two-thirds chance of being right. After the experimenter opens one of these two boxes, always empty, those two boxes still have a two-thirds chance, now concentrated in the remaining unchosen box, while the subject's original choice still had its original one-third chance. So, one should always change one's choice.

Shit. Well, put it that way, it was undeniable. Though it still seemed wrong. But this was the point. Human cognition had all kinds of blind spots. One analyst of the studies had concluded by saying that we simulate in our mind actions we wish we had already happened. We act in short, by projecting our desires.

Well -- but of course. Wasn't that the point?

But clearly it could lead to error. The question was, should one's desires be defined in such a way as to suggest actions that were truly going to help make them come to pass in one of those futures still truly possible, given the conditions of the present.

p. 73

Where to begin? I guess with the comment that this was made into a great TV show hosted by Monty Hall - he always revealed the door not chosen. I wonder what other cognitive traps are revealed by game shows. Maybe we should ask Alec Trabec about directions for further research. LOL

More seriously, if we alter our perceptions based on our desires, and don't get me started on reflector neurons here, how can we see what is truly happening? Can we even see what our true desires are? How can we start to make plans to realize our desires, when they are affecting the perception of reality we need to make those plans.

A thorny knot indeed. I will have to think about this, but a first approximation of the solution may be to not think for a while. Meditation or contemplation anyone?

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-24T00:03:00.000-07:00

from the Green candidates inaugural address as President of the US:

In the years since we used our government to help us get out of the Great Depression, it has sometimes been fashionable to belittle the American government as some kind of foreign burden laid on us. That attitude is nothing more than an attack on american history, deliberately designed to shift power away from the American people.

p. 63

I Think this often. It is why I consider Rush Limbaugh unAmerican. He attacks the institutions of government. He want to allow the robber barrons to rule us without any democratic controls to stem their greed. I am not against attacking bad government and arguing to make it better. Any big system has lots of room for error. But just saying the government is bad is anti-American. Government was what the constitution was designed to create. Can't knock that.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-23T17:25:00.000-07:00

Charlie wanted to live on in this life forever. Or if not forever, then as long as the stars. And he feared change, as being the probable degradation of a situation that couldn't be bettered.

But here it was anyway, and there was no avoiding it. All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.

p. 55

The eternal now. It is the only moment we ever have. We have to be in the moment and live it as it comes. And it is always new. It just depends on our point of view.

Yeah.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

The president of the United States might be many thins, but unpowerful was not among them. Many of the administrations preceding Phil's had worked very hard to expand the powers of the executive branch beyond what the framers had intended -- which campaigns made a mockery of the "strict constitutionalist" talk put out by these same people when discussing what principles the Spreme Court's justices should hold, and showed they preferred a secretive executive dictatorship to democracy, especially if the president was a puppet installed by the interested parties.

p. 51

What a nice summation of the constitutional damage done by the Bushies!

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-18T02:28:00.000-07:00

Frank is talking with Rudra, his Tibetan friend,

"There's too many ... different things going on at once. I go from thing to thing, you know. Hour to hour. I see people, I do different things with them, and I'm not ... I don't feel like the same person with these different people. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what to do. If anyone were watching they'd think I had some sort of mental disorder. I don't make any sense."

"But no one is watching."

"Except what if they were?"

Rudra shook his head. "No one can see inside you. So no matter what they see, they don't know. Everyone only judges themself."

"That's not good!" Frank said. "I need someone more generous than that!"

p. 405

Lord have mercy on us because we have none on ourselves.

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-18T02:05:00.000-07:00

a green presidential candidate speaking:

The President isn't going to do anything. He and his oil-and-guns crowd will just try to find an island somewhere to skip to when they're done raiding the world. They'll leave us in the wreckage and build themselves bubble fortresses, that's been their sick plan all along. building a good world for our kids is our plan, and it's as scientific as can be, but only if you understand science as a way of being together, an ethical system an not just a method for seeing the world. What this political endorsement underlines is that science contains in it a plan for dealing with the world that we find ourselves in, a plan which aims to reduce human suffering and increase the quality of life on Earth for everyone.

p. 371

I like the idea of science as an ethical system. The excesses of modern life are not a result of science, but of marketing: big companies trying to get everyone to buy one thing. They often leap on a single scientific idea and then push it to death. They have no flexibility. They have invested so much in one idea that they cannot switch. Look at the recent revelations about the manipulation of drug studies by the pharmaceutical industry. What a racket and then people blame science an scientists.

Just today, there was an article in the N Y. Times about the life span of a company. It was about Microsoft's complete failure to jump from the hardware/software business to the interent. It suggested that companies have "term limits." The idea actually came from Bill Gates who suggested that companies cannot survive a paradigm shift in their industries. And he quit this week, too.

Science at its best would take to common goals of a society and then try to find the best answers. Even the goals of cooperation are scientifically valid. Not only is science based on sharing of ideas and a cooperative building of knowledge, the idea of sharing for the common good is provable as a survival benefit. Wouldn't it be nice if we were all that rational.

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-07T16:00:00.000-07:00

"From the nose to the brain." Oh, my: there were synapses that ran from one end of the brain to the other. They went from the nose to everywhere. Scent, memory, behaviors associated with pleasure. These tapped into the dopamine that was made available in the nucleus accumbens in the basal forebrain, behind the back of the mouth. This availability depended on a long biochemical sequence functioning well at every point.

The right frontal cortices were more associated with negative emotions than the left; the right somatosensory cortices were active in integrating body movement, which might be why they were the apparent seat of empathy. Blocking oxytocin in a female prairie vole did not interfere with its sex drive, but with the attachment to its partner that would usually correlate to sex. Suppressing vasopressin had the same effect on male voles, who would normally be faithful for life, voles being monogamous. You needed both the insula and the anterior cingulate working well to be able to experience joy. Fluency of ideation increased with joy, decreased with sorrow. The brain was often flooded with endogenous opoid peptides such as endomorphines, enkephalin, dynorphin, endorphins -- all painkillers. You needed those. Brain systems that supported ethical behaviors were probably not dedicated to ethics exclusively, but rather also to biological regulation, memory, decision-making, and creativity. In other words, to everything. You needed joy to function well. In fact, it appeared that competent, successful decision-making depended on full capacity in all the emotions; and these in turn depended on a healthy prefrontal cortex.

p. 300

"Fluency of ideation increased with joy" -- I am thinking of the structured decision making processes that we have been working with in the NEAD project and groups such as the Institute for 21st Century Agoras. They begin with a meal so that all the participants see each other as people, not labels or groups. But it also creates satiation and hence joy - and thus ideation. It all fits.

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-07T15:28:00.000-07:00

For a while they talked in a different way than they normally did, about how things felt; and they agreed that lives were not easily told to others. Frank speculated that many life stories consisted precisely of a search for a reiterated pattern, for habits. Thus, one's set of habits was somehow unsatisfactory, and you needed to change them, and were thereby thrown into a plot, which was the hunt for new habits, or even, but exceptionally, the story of giving up of such a hunt in favor of sticking with what you have, or remaining chaotically in the existential moment (not adaptive if reproductive success were the goal, he noted under his breath). Thus Frank was living a plot, while Anna was living a life, and when they talked about personal matters he had news while she had the "same old same old," which was understood by both to be the desired state, irritating though it might be to maintain.

Anna merely laughed at this.

p. 143

Habitual existence as a life and interesting existences as "plots." And the Chinese say, "May you live in interesting times." LOL

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-05T16:32:00.000-07:00

The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spend almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that -- even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parcelled out. There were:

the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;
the people you worked with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;
the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week;
then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full calendar according to Frank's calculations so far, suggesting they were all living more hours a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety except you yourself.

One could, therefore:

pursue a project in paleolithic living,
change the weather
attempt to restructure your profession, and
be happy,

all at once. although not simultaneously, but moving from one thing to another, among different populations; behaving as if a different person in each situation. It could be done, because there were no witnesses. No one saw enough to witness your life and put it all together.

p. 57

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

It was easy in these arguments to see the way people thought of agencies in terms of human qualities, so that the agencies ended up behaving in the world like individuals in terms of power, will, skills, and effectiveness. Some were amazingly effective for their size, others were permanently hampered by personality and history.

p. 94

I like the metaphor of the individual to understand the government's agencies. Can FEMA ever get beyond its personal history? And we wonder why Myanmar doesn't want our emergency response teams? And we will think it is politics, rather than images of New Orleans on the net. LOL

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

Nobody likes Washington, D. C. Even the people who love it don't like it. Climate atrocious, traffic worse: an ordinary midsize gridlocked American city, in which the plump white federal buildings make no real difference. Or rather they bring all the politicians and tourists, the lobbyists and diplomats and refugees and all the others who come from somewhere else, often for suspect reasons, and thereafter spend their time clogging he streets and hogging the shows, talking endlessly about their non-existent city on a hill, whole ignoring the actual city they are in. The bad taste of that hypocrisy can't be washed away by even the food and drink of a million very fine restaurants. No -- bastion of the world government, locked vault of the World Bank, headquarters of the world police; Rome, in the age of bread and circuses -- no one can like that.

p. 3

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-04T17:28:00.000-07:00

on having poison ivy:

Putting on clothes was like a kind of skin-deep electrocution.

It had only taken a few days of that to reduce him to a kind gibbering semi-hallucinatory state. Now, over a week later, it was worse. His eyes were sandy; things had auras around them; noises made him jump. It was like the dregs of a crystal-meth jag, he imagined, or the last hours of an acid trip. A sandpapered brain, spacy and raw, everything leaping in through the senses.

p. 320

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-04T17:03:00.000-07:00

It takes no great skill to decode the world system today. A tiny percentage of the population is immensely wealthy, some are well off, a lot are just getting by, a lot are suffering. We call it capitalism, but within it lies buried the residual pattern of feudalism and older hierarchies, basic injustices framing the way we organize ourselves. Everybody lives in an imaginary relationship to this real situation; and this is our world. We walk with scales on our eyes, and only see what we think.

And all the while on a sidewalk over the abyss. There are islands of time when things seem stable. Nothing happens but the rounds of the week. Later the islands break apart. When enough time has passed, no one now alive will be still be here; everyone will be different. Then it will be the stories that link the generations. history and DNA, long chains of the simplest bits -- guanine, adenine, cytosine, thymine -- love, hope, fear, selfishness -- all combining again and again, until a miracle happens

and the organism springs forth!

p. 313

What a concept - relating stories and DNA - chains of the simplest bits linking the generations! WOW!

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-04T16:37:00.000-07:00

"We are animals, animals whose wisdon has epanded so far as to tell us we are mortal creatures. We die. For fifty thousand years we have known this. Much of our mental energy is spent avoingding this knowledge. We do not like to think of it. Then again, we know that even the cosmos is mortal. Reality is mortal. All things change ceaselessly. Nothing remains that same in time. Nothing can be held on to. The questions becomes, what do we do with this knowledge? How do we live with it? How do we make sense of it?"

[And now they hook Frank with an evolutionary idea!]

"One of the scientific terms for compassion ... you say, 'altruism.' This is a question in your animal studies. Does true altruism exist, and is it a good adaptation? Does compassion work, in other words? You have done studies that suggest altruism is the best adaptive strategy, if seen from a group context. This then becomes a kind of ... admonishment. To practice compassion in order to successfully evolve -- this coming from your science, which claims to be descriptive only! Only describing what has worked to make us what we are. But in Buddhism we have always said, if you want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself, practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species, practice compassion."

p. 243

All throughout the book, our hero, Frank, keeps thinking about the prisoner's dilemma game and its strategies. It does seem that in repeated games the best strategy is to be generous the first time. It sort of makes sense in the way of holding a group together. The Golden Rule is an evolutionary adaptation.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-05-04T16:24:00.000-07:00

speaking of science and Buddhism:

Drepung [a Tibetan Buddhist monk] said, "The two are now parallel studies. One the one hand, science has specialized, through mathematics and technology, on natural observation, finding out what is, and making new tools. On the other, Buddhism has specialized in human observation, to find out -- how to become. Behave. What to do. How to go ahead forward. Now, I say, they are like the two eyes in the head. Both are necessary to create whole sight. Or rather ... there is an old saying: 'Eyes the see, feet that walk.' We could say that science is the eyes and Buddhism is the feet."

p. 242

This is a great part of the book and the next several posts are from this lecture given by Tibetan Buddhists st the NSF. I was particularly struck by this section because I was reading it a few weeks ago, as the protests over Chinese occupation of Tibet have been going on. It is a shame to see the domination of one system over another, but in the book, the Tibetans are careful to say that it is not a place, but a state of mind. I am not sure that this is really what they believe, biut the characters in the novel are quite well expressed and seem very real.

Of course, that is what a novel is all about. And this is a major turing point in this book for the main character, Frank. The rational man of science, a bit ruthless, and always thing of the evolutionary underpinnings of behaviour is blown away by an old Tibetan monk talking about science and Buddhism. But we need a theory of behaviour, which science cannot provide. We can talk about political science or social science and use observation techniques and rational logic to analyze what we see, but we then need to be able to say "This is what we should do!"

This is a recurring problem in the ISSS organization. There are academics who are looking at how systems work and the best way to create, repair and sustain human systems, but they are often uncomfortable with the idea that it means we should do something. Similarly, in my school, the School of Policy Studies, very smart individuals, who teach how to make good policies often become idiots and make bad policy because they do not want to take their academic expertise and apply it in the real world. I think it is fear - they are afraid that their research is not valid or not really anything. And that is where Buddhism is a very brave thing - the will to do.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-04-22T20:40:00.000-07:00

on a lunch time lecture at the NSF:

These were people still interested enough in ideas to spend a lunch hour listening to a lecture on the philosophy of science. It would be like that in some departments at USD, perhaps even on most university campuses, despite the insane pace of life. Surplus time and energy, given over to curiosity; a fundamental hominid behaviour. The basic trait that got people into science, that made science in the first place, surviving despite the mind-numbing regimes of its modern-day expression.

p. 239

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-04-22T20:36:00.000-07:00

North on the freeway, crowded but not impossibly so, people zipping along like starlings, following the flock rules keep as far apart from the rest as possible and change speeds as little as possible. The best drivers in the world.

p. 159

I like the idea of traffic as a flock - great explanatory power.

Please comment

2008-04-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

I have heard from a couple of people that they are reading these.

Please let me know what you think about these quotes. What do they make you think about?

Let's have a talk abut these things.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-04-14T17:07:00.000-07:00

California is a place apart.

Gold chasers went west until the ocean stopped them, and there in that remote and beautiful land, separated from the rest of the world by desert and mountain, prairie and ocean, they saw there could be no more moving on. They would have to stop and make a life here.

Civil society, post Civil War. A motley of argonauts, infused with Manifest Destiny and gold fever, also with Emerson and Thoreau, Lincoln and Twain, their own John Muir. They said to each other, Here at the end of the road it had better be different, or else world history has come to naught.

So they did many things, good and bad. In the end it turned out the same as everywhere else, maybe a little more so.

p. 155

I love it - California as the end of the road, the end of the world. But them I am an unabashed Californian.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-04-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

[After his infant son and a youth with a ballon have caused a whole car of subway riders to laugh.]

Charlie got out, grinning, and carried Joe into the Blue/Orange level. He marveled at the infectiousness of moods in a group. Strangers who would never meet again, unified suddenly and a toddler playing a game. By laughter. Maybe the real oddity was how much one' fellow citizens were usually like furniture in one's life.

P. 138

Our fellow beings are like furniture in our lives. What a thought here in Japan. Japanese often completely ignore others in public spaces. I think they really can't see them. However, it may be a realistic adaptation to the extreme crowding. If you watch and get involved with all those people you will go insane.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-04-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

But science didn't work like capitalism. That was the rub, that was one of the rubs in the general dysfunction of the world. Capitalism rules, but money was too simplistic and inadequate a measure of the wealth that science generated. In science, one built up over the course of a career a fund of "scientific credit," by giving work to the system in a way that would seem altruistic. People remembered what you gave, and later there were various forms of return on the gift - jobs, labs. In that sense a good investment for the individual, but in the form of a gift to the group. It was the non zero-sum game that the prisoner's dilemma could become if everyone played by the strategies of always generous, or, better, firm but fair. That was one of the things that science was -- a place that one entered by agreeing to hold to the strategies of cooperation, to maximize the total return of the game.

p. 124

What a wonderful description of the process of science, the cooperation to build something more than the sum of the parts. What a great thing!

Next books

2008-04-14T14:37:00.000-07:00

Hi,

I am a bit sorry about not writing for a while. I have been reading, but there hasn't seemed to be much that I want to share. For some of the authors, I think that is a bit disappointing. For others, it is that what I liked was not the turn of phrase, but the general story. This is especially true of satirical works. I have also beent ravelling, having returned to CA for two weeks and then off to a week in Dubai. Then back for the start of school.

But all of that is about to change. I am reading one of my favorite authors, Kim Stanley Robinson. When I read his books I often want to mark stuff down and put it on paper so I can keep it after I close the book. He is a very preceptive observer of humanity and well versed in science of all sorts. I have started reading his latest series: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting.

And I pulled out my page points. (They were originally sold by Levenger, but they changed their design and I like this design better. IT seems to me to be the original design.) I have been carrying them around so I can mark what I read for posting here. I will pull out the first few quotes today and then let in a few more over the next days and weeks.

Stay tuned.

Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

2008-02-24T00:31:00.000-08:00

Essentially, we're breeding the underclass into extinction. Once we get into one o these poverty zones the first thing we do is give it improved healthcare. After that, the next generation takes advantage of universal schooling; they can see that there's a world outside the ghetto that's worth taking part in. From that they progress to earning a living, they contribute to the whole rather than detract.

p. 595

This is an interesting idea - that healthcare is a prerequisite for participation in society. As healthcare becomes more and more precious in our society, this seems very important. It is sort of moving up on the Maslow scale - taking care of one's self should be easy, then other things like education and achievement can kick in.

So, when do we get universal healthcare. I pay almost $1000/mo for healthcare in 2 countries. It seems a bit much.

Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

2008-02-24T00:24:00.001-08:00

A clean start on a fresh world. It's a desire that's hardwired into so many humans. It comes from our impetuosity and curiosity, the wanderlust gene. But it also has roots in the dissatisfaction with the society in which we live. How mush easier it is to move and start anew than to rectify the institutional, even constitutional, mistakes fo a monolithic social system. Between them, these motivators were enough to launch the first wave of colonies It was always going to be financially unviable... but still we went ahead.

p. 593

This is sort of the old idea that colonies can never solve the problems that they are trying o alleviate. Australia did not solve the problems of poverty and crime in England. Also, we often want to just walk away from fixing problems and start fresh and new and make the same mistakes again, only in the future, sparing us with dealing with the problems.

This whole section fo the book has some very interesting thoughts about society and social problems. Very nice.

Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

2008-02-24T00:14:00.000-08:00

As for the universe, it is contained in your mind. Observation is purely relative. I can watch the stars from here, all of them, while you crawl between them in your tin cans ans see only one at a time. I appreciate my life, Earthman; there is less memory in my brain, and much more thought.

p. 462

Less memory and more thought? What a concept.

Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

2008-02-24T00:10:00.000-08:00

It's just that nowhere you live can ever be exotic. That's only ever somewhere else.

p. 94

This reminds me of a quote from Chip Delaney in Stars in My Pockets like Grains of Sand, where Marq Deyth remarks that home is a place you can never go for the first time; you can only return there. The first time, it isn't home yet, although it may come to be home.

Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

2008-02-24T00:03:00.000-08:00

So the lies and moods just kept on swinging a little further each time, picking curiously at the envelope of acceptability as if it were an interesting scab. All the while he built a defensive shell of stubborn silence around himself, which grew progressively thicker each time his father raged and his mother showed her quiet disapproval. Nothing apart from i-media interested him, nothing apart from gaining more i-media time motivated him; he had few friends, his teachers virtually gave up, and sibling rivalry at home began to resemble a full-blown war zone. With his hate-the-world attitude and his rampaging hormones, he was the basic teenager from hell.

p. 86

Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

2008-02-23T23:57:00.000-08:00

So there she was at a quarter past midnight, tired and utterly miserable, standing in the kitchen in her toweling robe, ironing her blouse for tomorrow while the shrill whoops of other people's orgasms echoed along the hall.

If there was such a thing as karma, somebody somewhere in this universe was going to get hurt bad to level this out.

p. 33

And you thought your day was bad. LOL

Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

2008-02-23T23:51:00.000-08:00

Jedzella stuck her hand up, finders wiggling frantically, "Were they people just like us?"

"Their bodies were different." Denise said. "Some of the races who ere members of the empire had arms and legs similar to ours, some had wings, some had four legs, or six or ten, some had tentacles, some were fish, and some were so big and scary that if you and I saw them we'd run away. But how do we judge people?"

"What they say and do," the children yelled happily, "never how they look."

p. 22

I wish more schools taught this sort of thing.

Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

2008-02-19T15:50:00.000-08:00

... but after four decades of accumulated optimization the 3rd fleet software had become classic bloatware, total deadweight.

p. 14

I thought o my own computer and the term bloatware. I have a lot of programs hat I get and them only use a little. Often they are superseded by newer versions or by different programs that take over the functions I originally bought them for. Sometimes the companies that make the software are bough by others and then there is a very strange merging of functions that may leave orphan software on the hard drive. And, now that hard drive space is so cheap, there is often no incentive to delete things I don't event think about anymore. Of course you can get a new machine, as I do almost every year, but, with the mac, it is so easy to just transfer all hat deadweight to the new drive so it looks just like the old desktop, with all its flaws. Will it eventually collapse? How do companies deal with this?

Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

2008-02-19T15:44:00.000-08:00

It would start with one of them making some comment: Thought you company people were too good to drink with us. Not that it mattered what was actually said, the ac of speaking was a way of ego-pumping until one of them was hot enough to throw the first punch. Same dumb-arse ritual in every lowlife bar on every human planet.

p. 5

Peter Hamilton

2008-02-19T15:39:00.001-08:00

I am going to be posting a few quotes from one of my very favorite authors - Peter F. Hamilton. He is a British author who has written some great har SF, space opera things in the past ten years or so. His Night's Dawn Trilogy is one of the most creative takes on the future to come along in a very long time.

Peter's books are often very complicated with a lot of character to keep track of. They are very complex characters, an their interaction is always interesting. There is a real political feel to these stories because of the shifting patterns of the various factions and players. IT can be hard to keep track of and it is not for everyone. But I like it.

So, during the recent snow, I curled up with Fallen Dragon, and let the cold stay outside.

Bob Heinlein

2008-02-19T15:23:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting a lot recently because I have been reading some Heinlein stories. I used to think that he was one of the writers who had a really good way with words and so I was surprised when I didn't really find much in the way of quotes. When I fist read him as a teenager, I was struck by what I felt was the really great philosophy and the cutting edge ideas. So, what happened on the reread?

One of the things about Heinlein is that he makes speeches and puts his personal philosophy into the mouths of his characters. Now, I like the philosophy, but I found that the speeches aren't really quotable. They are interesting, mostly, but they aren't really well worded. Some of his ideas are also situationally conveyed and that also is hard to quote.

And then maybe it was the stories I read - Tunnel in the Sky and Day After Tomorrow. THey are older pieces and not of the quality of, say, Stranger in a Strange Land. I will reread that in the next few months and we'll see if it holds up over time.

political commentary

2008-01-21T16:51:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about Sf is the idea of a future history. Bob Heinlein (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein) was about the first to think of it that way. In the previous quote from Stross, he sums up are very interesting perspective on current events from a slightly future perspective. It is interesting to speculate on what might be. By looking at the possibilities, we can perhaps avoid some disasters. But then, I am an optimist.

Halting State, Charles Stross

2008-01-21T16:41:00.000-08:00

"... And what we're facing is a real headache -- a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon."

Who is we? That's the question you're asking yourself...

" 'We, ' for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in - call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People's Republic of China, and India. America isn't in play -- they've only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we setting up the convergence criteria for Russian ascension to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date, and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. It's exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. But today, our infrastructure -- Europe's -- is in bette shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-modern relatively recently, so their infrastructure is new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So, there's this constant jockeying for position between the three hyper powers while the USA takes time out..."

Halting State, Charles Stross

2008-01-21T16:37:00.000-08:00

speaking of COEs:

"Chris and Hackman are trying to outasshole each other." Her lips underscore the dry disapproval of her tone. "When they finish posturing, the lawyers will broker a deal, and the winner gets to dry-hump the loser's leg."

p. 139

Halting State, Charles Stross

2008-01-21T15:19:00.000-08:00

faeco-ventilatory intersection

p. 170

LOL!

Halting State, Charles Stross

2008-01-21T15:12:00.000-08:00

It's like that first alcoholics anonymous meeting: "Hi, my name is Jack. And I have a code problem."

You're a grown-up, these days. You don't wear a kamikaze pilot's rising sun headband and a tee-shirt that screams DEBUG THIS! and you don't spend your weekends competing in extreme programming slams at a windy campsite in Frankfurt, but it's generally difficult for you to use any machine that doesn't have at least one compiler installed: In fact, you had to stick Python on your phone before you even opened it's address book because not being able to brainwash it left you feeling handicapped, like you were a passenger instead of a pilot. In another age you would have been a railway mechanic or a grease monkey crawling over the spark plugs of a DC-3. This is what you are, and the sad fact is, they can put the code monkey in a suit, but they can't take the code out of the monkey.

p. 163

Halting State, Charles Stross

2008-01-21T15:09:00.000-08:00

black-nets - anti-social networking sites

p. 155

What a concept - sites for the underworld.

off topic

2008-01-17T01:19:00.001-08:00

But very interesting is a blog on life in Japan by my friend Jay Melton.

If you are interested in life here, check out
http://blog.jklmelton.net

Halting State, Charles Stross

2008-01-17T01:04:00.000-08:00

The sky turns deep blue, the world freezes, and a progress bar marches slowly across it from horizon to horizon. Ethereal runes written in aurorae six hundred kilometers high scrawl across the heavens, UPDATING REALITY, and for a moment your skin crawls with superstitious dread. Someday we're all going to get brain implants and experience this directly. Someday everyone is going to live their lives out in places like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot follow. You see it coming, slamming towards you out of the future, like the empty white static that is all anyone has ever heard from beyond the stars: a Final Solution to the human condition, an answer to the Fermi paradox, lights on at home and all the windows tightly shuttered. Because it's a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you're a sucker for it: Isn't storytelling what being human is all about?

p. 104

I love the UPDATING REALITY - sort of like the election cmpaign. %^)

Halting State, Charles Stross

2008-01-17T01:02:00.000-08:00

It's funny how it takes game space to bring out the poet in you. And it's even funnier how you're embarrassed about letting it show.

p. 103

Blogging these quotes

2008-01-16T15:32:00.000-08:00

I read a lot and I read mostly SF and fantasy. I should read more other stuff, but that's the way it is. However, one thing I notice about some of my favorite authors is that they have a way of putting things that seems just right. Often, they can take a scientific concept and put it in a real world context, at least real in the speculative world the author is creating. I often say I want to write these down and so here is the place I am doing it.

One of the reasons I am blogging these quotes is to help me remember them. I think that the somatic modality of typing them into the computer will help me remember them. I hope so. Things slip out of the memory so easily these days. I guess they always did, but now I worry more about it as I get older.

And then again, maybe this is just an effort to put a little discipline into my writing.

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

2008-01-16T15:30:00.000-08:00

WHATEVER YOU ARE, BE A GOOD ONE [seen on a packpack]

p. 406

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

2008-01-14T14:19:00.000-08:00

A failure to understand social webbing at an emotional level, Jacobson had found, and so a lack of those emotional restraints that embedding within such webbing requires. But Carl didn't know a single thirteen ho hadn't laughed like a fast-food clown construct when they read those lines. We understand, he told Zooly one drinken night. Fingers snapped out one by one, enumerating, like stabbing implements, finally the blade of a hand. Nationalism. Tribalism. Politics. Religion. Fucking soccer, for Christ's sake. Pacing her apartment living room, furious, like something caged. How could you not understand dynamics that fucking simplistic. It's the rest of you people who don't understand what makes you tick at an emotional fucking level.

p. 273

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

2008-01-14T14:15:00.000-08:00

"See once upon a time, " Yavuz was saying, "fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country string with xenophobia. That's the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can't live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependance and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge's terms a non-adaptive trait.'

p. 248

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

2008-01-14T14:12:00.000-08:00

Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead.

p. 201

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

2008-01-14T14:08:00.000-08:00

Curtailment of freedom is a powerful social tool and must be deployed as such, with wisdom and restraint. It is therefore vital to distinguish the genuine and the quite complex parameters of what is socially necessary, and the simplistic and emotive demands of a growing popular hysteria. Failure to make this distinction is likely to have unattractive consequences.

- Jacobsen Report

August 2091

p. 107

Introduction

2008-01-12T18:58:00.001-08:00

This is the start of a blog to record quotes from things I am reading, and perhaps some thoughs that spring from those quotes.